Every once in a while, we went to the slaughterhouse in Cambridge and collected chick brains. We'd go in with big rubber boots, coming back with a bucket full of chick brains, which then the students had to dissect and homogenize and extract. From those very earliest experiments, we knew we had a long way to go because the purest extracts had to be a million times more pure than the crude brain extract [estimated] by quantitative dose response curves. Tom Jessell and Ruth Siegel had begun the earliest stages of gel filtration and ion exchange chromatography. I sound like I'm an expert in the area, but I'm still an electrophysiologist and I learned a lot in those years in the pharmacology department at Harvard.

But that place also had some frustrations. One was I tried very hard to recruit a superb young scientist by the name of Dick Tsien. I don't know if you know that name, but Richard is one of the real giants of neurophysiology. He was in California at the time and is now chairman of the Department of Neuroscience at NYU. I tried to recruit him to Harvard, and he said he would love to come, but Harvard would not give our department more than $10,000 to recruit him, so we both agreed this was not going to work.

Soon after that, I thought the academia, the teaching of neuropharmacology, the proximity to neurobiology wasn't enough to keep me from considering a position of chairman of [anatomy and] neuroscience at Washington University, and we eventually moved there. Ruth was very reluctant to leave proximity to family and New York and she was in the middle of her thesis work, PhD work on the sociology of neuroscience at BU. She had a very good job, but we figured she's finished much of her original research, she can do her writing of her thesis in St. Louis. She did it, worked in the attic of our house for a couple of years, writing.